OK, so Gil Smart thinks he has the right all figured out.
Here’s the calculus Smart sets up in his most recent column: Conservatives simply want what they want and will use big government to get it and will urge small government to keep it, ideological consistency be darned.
He cites our opposition to abortion and gay marriage as evidence of the right’s big government neo-Progressivism.
First things first. Conservatives oppose abortion on two grounds.
First, conservatives consider abortion the murder of a human person. And government, if it is to do anything, must protect innocent human life. If it can’t, or in this case won’t, do that, it probably has no reason to exist.
Second, we object to the rewriting of the U.S. Constitution to make it a right. I know, I know, Gil says the 7-2 majority in that 1973 case merely recognized a right that was there all along. It’s an interesting but unpersuasive argument for two reasons.
First because the “right to privacy” that underlies Roe came via the “penumbras, formed by emanations” of various rights actually mentioned in the Constitution. The nation’s highest court made these discoveries in a 1965 farce known as Griswold v. Connecticut. Let’s face it, when you start doing what the court did here, hanging its legal reasoning on the corners of shadows of rights it sees emanating from the Constitution, you’re just plain making stuff up.
Second, even one the justices who concurred in Griswold, Byron White, was appalled at the right to privacy’s application to abortion. White was one of the two dissenters in the Roe v. Wade abortion decision. (And this, I would suggest, might be the predicament of a guy like Gil if the nation’s highest court declares gay marriage a “right” and then later expands it to include polygamy.)
Now on to gay marriage.
Conservatives by and large oppose gay marriage because they see the benefits accorded to married couples as privileges meant to support those who will give us our next generation. That, in most cases, will be married men and women.
And seeing the family as a pillar of society on which its future depends, we resist giving those privileges to groups that cannot bear children naturally.
And it’s why I personally would find a judicial decree of gay marriage as a right particularly offensive. If liberals can convince us that gay unions are as good for society as straight ones, then we should extend at least some of the benefits of marriage to them as well. And, if they can convince us that their families are as good or better environments for raising children, then it’s time to declare those unions equal in all things.
And, finally, back to Gil’s overall thesis.
It seems a little absurd to call the mere upholding of traditions — opposition to infanticide and male-female marriages — big government Progressivism.
I say Gil doesn’t understand conservatism enough to criticize it in a rational way.
And one final thought: Has ANYONE called for a new bureaucracy, federal, state or local, to prosecute abortionists or regulate marriage? Big government, indeed.
